The Return of the Dire Wolf
Apr. 8th, 2025 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThe Return of the Dire Wolf
Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.
So let's analyze the ethics and logic of this event. I'll be using my grasp of extant science and sociology from local-Earth plus my farmemory of gengineering.
First, it is honorable to fix what you broke. Within the realm of gengineering, it is ethical to restore, as much as possible, species driven to extinction by human action. Humans have wiped out a large number of other species, directly or by contributing pressure to other causes. This includes the extinctions of most megafauna in the Americas. Since dire wolves are apex predators adapted to take down giant animals that humans ate to extinction, that also blames humans in large part for the demise of dire wolves. Therefore, the revival of the dire wolf is ethical.
The problem I see is that it's not logical. You can't float the top of a pyramid in midair. If you want to build a pyramid, you must start from the bottom up. This is true whether your construction materials are sandstone or animals. To recreate the mammoth steppe, first you need giant herbivores such as mammoths, American camels, and ground sloths. In fact, during the last 1.5 million years when Homo started getting stroppy with fire and tools, land mammals have lost 98% of body mass. Bluntly put, in a natural ecosystem you can't have huge carnivores without huge herbivores. There are a few cheats like whales that eat krill, but that's extremely rare.
Lo and behold, there IS a project to recreate the mammoth steppe! Pleistocene Park is in Russia with an area about 8 square miles, but we could just as well replicate that in Alaska and/or Canada. They started with horses, then reindeer, moose, wisents, muskoxen, yaks, and sheep. If I were doing this, I'd look at recreating giant animals from extant analogs -- that is, breed the biggest hairiest horses and the biggest hairiest cattle with an eye toward replacing lost species. We could likely do this much faster than actually de-extincting species. Anyhow, Pleistocene Park would be a great setup for adding large carnivores such as dire wolves -- but you'd need to calculate the predator:prey ratio carefully, as well as ensure that both cohorts had the necessary survival skills.
The biggest argument against the ethics of reviving dire wolves is don't create anything that could kill you. But I rule this below the priority of restoring the environment. It's not like we're short of humans, and if the environment finishes collapsing, that'll kill off a lot more people.
Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
The woolly mammoth might work in sufficiently cold locales, but those are shrinking ... in the northern hemisphere. Given the rate of global warming, I'd take a serious look at recolonizing Antarctica in the foreseeable future. It's not actually all that far from the climate that mammoths can endure, but you'd need to restore vegetation first. I think it's doable.
The thylacine is feasible, partly because much of Australia is thinly infested with humans. Also I'd be interested in seeing what a native Tasmanian wolf could do to introduced rabbits.
The dodo ... is legitimate only to salve the human conscience. Let's be honest, this is not really a naturally viable species.
Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.
O_O Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to make anything remotely like a mimmoth? Have we not already got enough mouse problems without buffing them? This is a terrible idea.
If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.
Valid in that it's harder to recreate a lost species. But I think they could've practiced on a common species such as dogs and learned enough to help the red wolves that way.
“If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people,” Shapiro says, “we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already.”
Well, they're not wrong -- and you can't have humans in a collapsed ecosystem, since that's a common historic cause of civilization collapse. Humans are not only an apex species, they're over the roughly 50-pound limit where mass extinctions tend to kill off all large mammals. (Cold-blooded species can sometimes cheat the limit due to needing less food.) Humans require an ecosystem to support their needs.
Scientific history is rife with examples of newly introduced species becoming invasive species—the doctrine of unintended consequences biting humans when we played too cute with other animals.
Valid, but a reintroduced, revived species is not the same as an introduced, invasive species. See the wolves of Yellowstone. This is why America's wild horses are not an invasive species, but a restored one.
Nearly 30 years after Dolly the sheep was cloned, the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems. What’s more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo.
While these risks are real, I judge them less than leaving a lot of gaping holes in the biosphere that we are all standing on. It can only take so much damage before it collapses to a state that won't support humans.
>> Still, Colossal’s scientists believe they are on to something powerful. <<
Oh, they are.
Matt James, the company’s chief animal officer—who once worked as senior director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo and Zoo Miami, where he managed the welfare of 7,000 animals representing 500 species—felt the significance of the science when Romulus and Remus were just 5 or 6 weeks old. The staff was weighing the little pups, and one of the veterinary techs began singing a song from The Little Mermaid. When she reached a point at which she vocalized first up, then down, Romulus and Remus turned her way and began howling in response.
“For me,” James says, “it was sort of a shocking, chilling moment.” These pups were the first to produce a howl that hadn’t been heard on earth in over 10,000 years.
And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028.
That would be so awesome. \o/
No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro.
But that might be a distinction without a difference. If it looks like a mammoth and behaves like a mammoth and, if given the opportunity to breed with another engineered elephant with mammoth-mimicking DNA, produces a baby mammoth, it’s hard to say that the species hasn’t been brought back from the dead. “Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” says Shapiro. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct."
Ecologically, what matters most is whether the resulting animal can fill the niche of the original. My bet is that if they make a giant, hairy proboscidean then it will get the job done. It might be a different subspecies or even species, but it would be mammoth enough to meet the need. Mammuthus primigenius novus, perhaps.
Wolf packs can, on occasion, be as small as two members, but typically include 15 or more. What’s more, the animals’ hunting territory can range anywhere from 50 to 1,000 sq. mi. Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic—not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives.
Already, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are exhibiting behaviors that would serve them well in the wild but do little for them in semicaptivity. They began howling when they were just 2 weeks old, and early on began stalking—hunting leaves or anything that moved. They also exhibited wolflike caution, running to hide in dark places if they were surprised or alarmed.
I will point out that while de-extincting a species is honorable, doing so just to masturbate your feelings or stare at it in a zoo is NOT. You must have a place for it in the ecosystem in order to count fully. We could certainly do that; America controls a great deal of wild space. There are national parks in Alaska where dire wolves could be feasibly reintroduced if the prey load was heavy enough. Okay, people jumped the gun a bit by making the dire wolves first when they seriously should have known better, but they are on track for making mammoths. It's not an irrecoverable mistake. But they owe the dire wolf species a realistic plan for rewilding.
“Our protocols ensure that people are never in a situation where the wolves might be frightened or become aggressive toward their caretakers,” she says.
They better be careful with that, because while modern wolves have some respect for humans, dire wolves remember them mostly as "long pig." It's bad enough when humans kill an ordinary animal for daring to assert itself, but killing the dire wolves would re-extinct them which is absolutely not okay. That's something you have to be very careful with in gengineering: once you create something, it has rights, so you can't change your mind and re-extinct something you revived. Choose wisely.
Rick McIntyre, a retired wolf researcher with the U.S. National Park Service and a Colossal adviser, warns that dire wolves vanished in the first place because they were specialized hunters, preying on huge animals like the mammoth and the 3,500-lb. Ice Age bison. When those beasts died out, so did dire wolves.
Well, at least someone other than me noticed. But let's call a spade a spade: humans killed off most of the megafauna. If they hadn't done that, a lot of other species would still be around.
“My guess is that they specialized in dealing with the very large megafauna of the Ice Age, whereas I would say that gray wolves are a bit more of a generalist,” says McIntyre. “We see gray wolves catch voles, ground squirrels, marmots, all the way up to the 2,000-lb. bull bison. A general principle in wildlife is that it’s good to be flexible. The more that you specialize, that can hurt you in the long run.”
True, but I'm curious. I'd like to see if dire wolves could learn to eat mice, rabbits, and current-sized bison. Then, would that be enough to support a breeding population of dire wolves? I think it's worth a try.
The mammoth creates even greater challenges. Elephants are exceedingly intelligent, exceedingly social creatures, gathering in herds of up to 25 individuals. Sometimes, those groups combine in much larger clans of up to 1,000 animals around a vital resource like a watering hole. In the wild, the animals will travel up to 40 miles a day in search of food and water—and that’s only average. Sometimes their daily wanderings may cover 125 miles. No one knows if mammoths would exhibit the same social and exploratory needs, but if they do, confining one or even a few individuals to an enclosure like the dire wolves’ would amount to a sort of near-solitary confinement.
Actually we DO know that:
A mammoth that lived in Alaska about 17,000 years ago traveled so far and wide that, if it had walked in a straight line, it would have gone all the way around the world — nearly twice.
Recent analysis of the woolly ice age beast's preserved tusk revealed that in 28 years, it walked almost 50,000 miles (80,500 kilometers). To retrace the adult mammoth's steps, researchers did something that had never been done before: They sliced open a mammoth tusk along its length, investigating the chemistry of the layers that built up in the tusk year after year during the animal's lifetime.
Then, they compared that data to chemical signatures in locations across Alaska that were identified from the teeth of small ice age mammals. By matching chemical element ratios in different parts of the tusk to similar ratios from the small-mammal teeth, scientists were able to create a regional map that showed where the mammoth lived from year to year.
Therefore, it is no more ethical to imprison a mammoth in a small space than it is to imprison a modern elephant. Admittedly humans do that, but it is not good for the elephants.
A much more appropriate deployment of de-extincted mammoths would be to recreate the mammoth steppe, which per the studies at Pleistocene Park would help resist climate change.
“I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea,” says Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.”
One is not enough. Two is barely better. Five, however, is a decent herd core.
The challenge lies in building it up, because herds are typically families of proboscideans. That is, a matriarch and her female offspring develop a herd over time. However, I think you could start with a handful of similarly-aged siblings living with a herd of modern elephants and simply cycle out the modern elephants as the mammoths grew up. You'd have to raise some boys too, and they may choose to be solitary or form a bachelor herd, because they'll get kicked out of the birth herd as they grow up. It would take nearly a modern human lifetime to develop a fully mature herd of mammoths with several generations of relatives. But we could get a functional herd with adults and offspring a lot faster.
If I were doing it, I'd aim to create 5 cores each with a set of 4 females and 1 male. Then put them in a big enough area so they could spread out and arrange their social interactions as they pleased. They would have enough individuals to start forming territories and relationships.
Now we need to talk about minimum viable population. You can't pat yourself on the back because you made 3 dire wolves or 5 mammoths. In order to count, you have to make enough to repopulate the species.
It has previously been suggested that elephant populations numbering as few as 100–300 individuals could be viable on 100-year timescales, but 1,000–3,000 may be necessary on longer timescales (Sukumar, 2003). Such prescriptions are too simplistic, because they ignore the vital rates themselves.
The lowball estimate is 100-300, and even the modified 1000-3000 is probably also far too low considering how slowly proboscideans reproduce. Can you afford to create, not just 1 or 5 individuals, but thousands? Because you have to build that many individuals at first, in order to create the genetic diversity they need to survive long-term and adapt to changing conditions. You can't just make a few and rely on reproduction, because of inbreeding. Even if you comb like crazy to remove all the bad genes you can find, you'll never get them all, and even then it's not a great idea because some genes have both positive and negative effects or even their impact is entirely contextual. Plus you shouldn't make your edited genes all identical, which is tricky -- you need to search for or create subtle variations. Frex, all the new dire wolves are white but most wolf types come in multiple colors. Diversity is strength. It is not ethical to start that ball rolling unless you are fully prepared to keep pushing it until the species is truly capable of sustaining itself. I don't think these scientists have done that math. But still, I would rather have 3 dire wolves than 0. Where there is life, there is hope.
I know how hard this is, I've done it, and it's a favorite tactic. But it is really fucking tedious, even if you have a computer with a good dither program to help build out your population. It just takes a monumental amount of manhours to achieve.
Just as important as Colossal’s mission to restore extinct species is its efforts to stop endangered ones from winking out entirely.
This is actually the most crucial advance. They've done the one thing nobody else has done: they have created fresh individuals. Not copies. Not babies from a minute gene pool. Pure original animals who should be able to breed naturally and effectively. THAT is the one thing that can save a species like red wolves or black-footed ferrets that have definitely been reduced below MVP. That's now a fixable problem. And that gets my vote for a Nobel. You have to wait and prove impact, so I'd say, make the nomination after they have bred fresh individuals and raised viable offspring to adulthood. That's doable with wolves in a few years, so I recommend they get cracking on those red wolves.
Along with its news about the dire wolves, the company also announced that it had cloned four red wolves—a small but important step in fortifying the species as a whole. With so few individuals remaining, the species suffers from what is known as a “genetic bottleneck,” a lack of diversity in the genome that can lead to infertility and inherited birth defects. What is needed is a way to refresh the gene line with new DNA, and science may have a way.
In the days before advanced genomics, conservationists identified all species—including the red wolf—principally by their phenotype, or appearance. Plenty of wolves that did not fit the right size or color for the red wolf might have been carrying what researchers refer to as “ghost alleles”—or red wolf gene variations that did not show up in the wolves’ color, size, or shape. Recently, Bridgett vonHoldt, a Colossal scientific adviser and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, an associate professor of wildlife science and conservation at Michigan Tech, discovered populations of canids along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas whose DNA included both coyote genes and red wolf ghost alleles. The four red wolves the Colossal scientists created used that natural genetic reservoir to produce what they call the first Ghost Wolf, with an eye to eventually fortifying the red wolf species with more such young carrying a variety of genes.
They are doing that part exactly right. :D 3q3q3q!!!
The cloned red wolves now live in a separate fenced area within the same 2,000-acre preserve as the dire wolves. Like Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, they will spend their lives there and not be rewilded. But later red wolves might be, as Colossal learns more about the clones’ health and fitness. The company says it’s in advanced discussions with the state of North Carolina about “conservation tools that can be used to help rescue the red wolf and accelerate its recovery.”
At least they have a viable, responsible game plan for the red wolves.
Through their work trying to bring back the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, one member of the marsupial family that includes the quoll, Colossal scientists have identified a single change in a single nucleotide—a basic building block of DNA and RNA—that could confer a 5,000-fold resistance to the cane toad neurotoxin.
That ... is a riskier approach.
“We as humanity introduced this cane toad species. We as humanity are now inadvertently killing off the quoll as well as other marsupials,” says Lamm. “This one change can make these super quolls that can love eating cane toads. Those are the types of wins that we can get using these genetic technologies.”
And what if the mod-quolls, like the cane toads, decide to do something different than humans want?
Still, scientists not affiliated with the company stress that genetic engineering is head-crackingly complex, and all manner of unintended downstream consequences can occur when you start mucking around in the engine room of the cells.
Sure. But it's still more refined than the biosphere's method of throwing a trillion plates of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. At least humans can try to aim. The question is how good they are at extrapolating what is a good idea, how to get there, what the predictable failure modes are, and how to avoid them.
“There’s a phenomenon called pleiotropy in which one gene has an effect on more than one trait,” says Alison van Eenennaam, professor of animal biotechnology and genetics at the University of California, Davis. “That’s true for many, many, many genes.
Almost all genes, in fact. DNA is an elegant system, which means that like fractals, there's a lot of multitasking.
There could be some genes they’re targeting for specific traits that have effects that are not compatible with survival.”
Of course there will be. It's one of the things that causes a high rate of deformities and early deaths. But it's a numbers game. If you're willing to pay the butcher's bill, you can crank out an answer to what is viable or not, and it may not always be the answer you expect. Look at malaria resistance / sickle-cell anemia in humans. I will further point out that the biosphere gives zero fucks about the butcher's bill or mortal suffering, and will shove whole genera into the grinder without hesitation to see if anything survives.
Gengineers need not only a sharp brain but also nerves of steel and an iron stomach. Don't cause needless suffering, but understand that monkeywrenching life will necessarily cause some. Consider your tolerances before choosing that career or even following it as a hobby, because the ethics are a lot more complex than most humans deal with. I mean you're literally getting off their standard chart, and at that not many even make it to the level 3 post-conventional state (nor is it encouraged). The next stage, cosmic or transcendental, is only theorized on that model. I can tell you it includes things like "Don't wipe out species," "Don't ravage the biosphere of an alien planet," "Don't blow up planets / stars," "Don't collapse a dimension," "Diversity is strength," etc. So if you're attempting to repair a biosphere? That is the level of ethics you need to analyze its cost-benefit and risk-benefit and other key calculatons regarding what you should or should not do. Don't pick up the hard science if you can't handle the corresponding soft science equally well, because that way lies disaster.
Then, too, there’s always the possibility that a precious handful of de-extincted animals could run riot in the modern world. The cane toad’s transition from pest eater to invasive species is a reminder of how quickly human intrusion into wild processes can spin out of control. Bioethicist Latham points to mosquito control as one more concerning example.
True, but you have to consider the failure modes. Reintroducing an extinct or extirpated species to its own environment is radically different from introducing a species where it does not belong. You'll still see some upheaval, but you're restoring a part that was missing and will, likely, improve matters by returning. We have numerous examples of this. That doesn't mean it can't go wrong, just that it's a solid bet -- and you also have to compare with the risk of doing nothing to stop the ongoing degradation from its loss, which can be astronomical.
Second, consider your control factors. It's not ethical to gengineer things that can breed out of control with a natural population, oh wait, L-Earth doesn't have that rule. But where you don't have a natural population, there isn't one to wreck by crossing with gengineered critters. By this rule, mammoths would be safer to revive than dire wolves, but even dire wolves would probably much prefer to breed with each other than with different species of canids -- if they'd even be fertile. That should absolutely be checked in a lab before considering a release, but if they are not fertile with other canids then that risk is null. Another option is to place species in a habitat where there simply aren't others they could mix with; islands work great for this, minding the rule of no introduced foreign species (oh wait, L-Earth doesn't use that rule either).
Colossal scientists are pressing ahead nonetheless, and the company is already thriving in an adaptive niche of its own—not just as a scientific enterprise, but as a formidable business. It has reached decacorn status, currently valued at $10.2 billion, and while it may not be easy to monetize a mammoth or a dodo or a dire wolf pup, Lamm sees plenty of commercial potential in the technologies his scientific team is developing.
Yes, there is. Zoos are one approach, and it may be argued that putting some animals in a zoo to improve the odds of species survival is justified -- as long as it's not the only endgame. But beyond that: SWAG. Dire wolf t-shirts, mouse pads, dog biscuits, anything you can think of. Same with mammoths. Make a website and start selling stuff. So long as you are working with endangered or extinct species, and not the fucking mimmoths, you can legitimately start a charity for people to sponsor their production and support. I would throw money at mammoths, or even dire wolves. But not dodos. I suspect someone else would, though. Seriously, science dudes, hire some marketing experts and try to find one with sane ethics. They're good at things you are not.
One, called Breaking, uses engineered microbes and enzymes to break down plastic waste.
You damn well better make sure THAT doesn't have a containment breach or you just screwed modern civilization. Look around your room: how much would disappear if something ate all the plastic? And what if plastic was no better for food preservation than the paper it muchly replaced?
Colossal does not have the field to itself—even if it is currently the most conspicuous player. Revive & Restore, a California-based conservation organization, provides funding for projects worldwide involving de-extinction, increasing biodiversity, and saving endangered species. Another group, Rewilding Europe, is providing support to scientists working to preserve and restore species across the European continent, including the bearded vulture, the Iberian lynx, the marbled polecat, the imperial eagle, and the auroch—the extinct ancestor of domestic cattle.
Like I said, charities offer a serious route to monetize revival science. Use it. And wahoo Team Aurochs! Can I hear a vote for the Irish greatdeer?
Whether the existing dire wolves or others Colossal might produce will be allowed to mate and spawn a next generation of wolves naturally is not yet known. Handlers can monitor the female estrous cycles and separate the animals at key times or employ contraceptive implants that keep the wolves from producing young until it is determined whether they have any abnormalities that could be passed on. The MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying.
Aho!
“I think of that famous Teddy Roosevelt quote,” says James, paraphrasing the 26th President. “In the moment of any choice, the first thing to do is the right thing. The next thing to do is the wrong thing. The worst thing to do is nothing at all.”
Often true, but Freeze is still a valid and even popular survival strategy. If you have time to think things through, you need to do that. In a really chaotic, changing situation like today -- doing nothing, or rather continuing the same course, will definitely screw you.
But today, L-Earth has dire wolves again. That's worth celebrating.
Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.
So let's analyze the ethics and logic of this event. I'll be using my grasp of extant science and sociology from local-Earth plus my farmemory of gengineering.
First, it is honorable to fix what you broke. Within the realm of gengineering, it is ethical to restore, as much as possible, species driven to extinction by human action. Humans have wiped out a large number of other species, directly or by contributing pressure to other causes. This includes the extinctions of most megafauna in the Americas. Since dire wolves are apex predators adapted to take down giant animals that humans ate to extinction, that also blames humans in large part for the demise of dire wolves. Therefore, the revival of the dire wolf is ethical.
The problem I see is that it's not logical. You can't float the top of a pyramid in midair. If you want to build a pyramid, you must start from the bottom up. This is true whether your construction materials are sandstone or animals. To recreate the mammoth steppe, first you need giant herbivores such as mammoths, American camels, and ground sloths. In fact, during the last 1.5 million years when Homo started getting stroppy with fire and tools, land mammals have lost 98% of body mass. Bluntly put, in a natural ecosystem you can't have huge carnivores without huge herbivores. There are a few cheats like whales that eat krill, but that's extremely rare.
Lo and behold, there IS a project to recreate the mammoth steppe! Pleistocene Park is in Russia with an area about 8 square miles, but we could just as well replicate that in Alaska and/or Canada. They started with horses, then reindeer, moose, wisents, muskoxen, yaks, and sheep. If I were doing this, I'd look at recreating giant animals from extant analogs -- that is, breed the biggest hairiest horses and the biggest hairiest cattle with an eye toward replacing lost species. We could likely do this much faster than actually de-extincting species. Anyhow, Pleistocene Park would be a great setup for adding large carnivores such as dire wolves -- but you'd need to calculate the predator:prey ratio carefully, as well as ensure that both cohorts had the necessary survival skills.
The biggest argument against the ethics of reviving dire wolves is don't create anything that could kill you. But I rule this below the priority of restoring the environment. It's not like we're short of humans, and if the environment finishes collapsing, that'll kill off a lot more people.
Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
The woolly mammoth might work in sufficiently cold locales, but those are shrinking ... in the northern hemisphere. Given the rate of global warming, I'd take a serious look at recolonizing Antarctica in the foreseeable future. It's not actually all that far from the climate that mammoths can endure, but you'd need to restore vegetation first. I think it's doable.
The thylacine is feasible, partly because much of Australia is thinly infested with humans. Also I'd be interested in seeing what a native Tasmanian wolf could do to introduced rabbits.
The dodo ... is legitimate only to salve the human conscience. Let's be honest, this is not really a naturally viable species.
Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.
O_O Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to make anything remotely like a mimmoth? Have we not already got enough mouse problems without buffing them? This is a terrible idea.
If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.
Valid in that it's harder to recreate a lost species. But I think they could've practiced on a common species such as dogs and learned enough to help the red wolves that way.
“If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people,” Shapiro says, “we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already.”
Well, they're not wrong -- and you can't have humans in a collapsed ecosystem, since that's a common historic cause of civilization collapse. Humans are not only an apex species, they're over the roughly 50-pound limit where mass extinctions tend to kill off all large mammals. (Cold-blooded species can sometimes cheat the limit due to needing less food.) Humans require an ecosystem to support their needs.
Scientific history is rife with examples of newly introduced species becoming invasive species—the doctrine of unintended consequences biting humans when we played too cute with other animals.
Valid, but a reintroduced, revived species is not the same as an introduced, invasive species. See the wolves of Yellowstone. This is why America's wild horses are not an invasive species, but a restored one.
Nearly 30 years after Dolly the sheep was cloned, the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems. What’s more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo.
While these risks are real, I judge them less than leaving a lot of gaping holes in the biosphere that we are all standing on. It can only take so much damage before it collapses to a state that won't support humans.
>> Still, Colossal’s scientists believe they are on to something powerful. <<
Oh, they are.
Matt James, the company’s chief animal officer—who once worked as senior director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo and Zoo Miami, where he managed the welfare of 7,000 animals representing 500 species—felt the significance of the science when Romulus and Remus were just 5 or 6 weeks old. The staff was weighing the little pups, and one of the veterinary techs began singing a song from The Little Mermaid. When she reached a point at which she vocalized first up, then down, Romulus and Remus turned her way and began howling in response.
“For me,” James says, “it was sort of a shocking, chilling moment.” These pups were the first to produce a howl that hadn’t been heard on earth in over 10,000 years.
And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028.
That would be so awesome. \o/
No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro.
But that might be a distinction without a difference. If it looks like a mammoth and behaves like a mammoth and, if given the opportunity to breed with another engineered elephant with mammoth-mimicking DNA, produces a baby mammoth, it’s hard to say that the species hasn’t been brought back from the dead. “Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” says Shapiro. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct."
Ecologically, what matters most is whether the resulting animal can fill the niche of the original. My bet is that if they make a giant, hairy proboscidean then it will get the job done. It might be a different subspecies or even species, but it would be mammoth enough to meet the need. Mammuthus primigenius novus, perhaps.
Wolf packs can, on occasion, be as small as two members, but typically include 15 or more. What’s more, the animals’ hunting territory can range anywhere from 50 to 1,000 sq. mi. Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic—not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives.
Already, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are exhibiting behaviors that would serve them well in the wild but do little for them in semicaptivity. They began howling when they were just 2 weeks old, and early on began stalking—hunting leaves or anything that moved. They also exhibited wolflike caution, running to hide in dark places if they were surprised or alarmed.
I will point out that while de-extincting a species is honorable, doing so just to masturbate your feelings or stare at it in a zoo is NOT. You must have a place for it in the ecosystem in order to count fully. We could certainly do that; America controls a great deal of wild space. There are national parks in Alaska where dire wolves could be feasibly reintroduced if the prey load was heavy enough. Okay, people jumped the gun a bit by making the dire wolves first when they seriously should have known better, but they are on track for making mammoths. It's not an irrecoverable mistake. But they owe the dire wolf species a realistic plan for rewilding.
“Our protocols ensure that people are never in a situation where the wolves might be frightened or become aggressive toward their caretakers,” she says.
They better be careful with that, because while modern wolves have some respect for humans, dire wolves remember them mostly as "long pig." It's bad enough when humans kill an ordinary animal for daring to assert itself, but killing the dire wolves would re-extinct them which is absolutely not okay. That's something you have to be very careful with in gengineering: once you create something, it has rights, so you can't change your mind and re-extinct something you revived. Choose wisely.
Rick McIntyre, a retired wolf researcher with the U.S. National Park Service and a Colossal adviser, warns that dire wolves vanished in the first place because they were specialized hunters, preying on huge animals like the mammoth and the 3,500-lb. Ice Age bison. When those beasts died out, so did dire wolves.
Well, at least someone other than me noticed. But let's call a spade a spade: humans killed off most of the megafauna. If they hadn't done that, a lot of other species would still be around.
“My guess is that they specialized in dealing with the very large megafauna of the Ice Age, whereas I would say that gray wolves are a bit more of a generalist,” says McIntyre. “We see gray wolves catch voles, ground squirrels, marmots, all the way up to the 2,000-lb. bull bison. A general principle in wildlife is that it’s good to be flexible. The more that you specialize, that can hurt you in the long run.”
True, but I'm curious. I'd like to see if dire wolves could learn to eat mice, rabbits, and current-sized bison. Then, would that be enough to support a breeding population of dire wolves? I think it's worth a try.
The mammoth creates even greater challenges. Elephants are exceedingly intelligent, exceedingly social creatures, gathering in herds of up to 25 individuals. Sometimes, those groups combine in much larger clans of up to 1,000 animals around a vital resource like a watering hole. In the wild, the animals will travel up to 40 miles a day in search of food and water—and that’s only average. Sometimes their daily wanderings may cover 125 miles. No one knows if mammoths would exhibit the same social and exploratory needs, but if they do, confining one or even a few individuals to an enclosure like the dire wolves’ would amount to a sort of near-solitary confinement.
Actually we DO know that:
A mammoth that lived in Alaska about 17,000 years ago traveled so far and wide that, if it had walked in a straight line, it would have gone all the way around the world — nearly twice.
Recent analysis of the woolly ice age beast's preserved tusk revealed that in 28 years, it walked almost 50,000 miles (80,500 kilometers). To retrace the adult mammoth's steps, researchers did something that had never been done before: They sliced open a mammoth tusk along its length, investigating the chemistry of the layers that built up in the tusk year after year during the animal's lifetime.
Then, they compared that data to chemical signatures in locations across Alaska that were identified from the teeth of small ice age mammals. By matching chemical element ratios in different parts of the tusk to similar ratios from the small-mammal teeth, scientists were able to create a regional map that showed where the mammoth lived from year to year.
Therefore, it is no more ethical to imprison a mammoth in a small space than it is to imprison a modern elephant. Admittedly humans do that, but it is not good for the elephants.
A much more appropriate deployment of de-extincted mammoths would be to recreate the mammoth steppe, which per the studies at Pleistocene Park would help resist climate change.
“I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea,” says Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.”
One is not enough. Two is barely better. Five, however, is a decent herd core.
The challenge lies in building it up, because herds are typically families of proboscideans. That is, a matriarch and her female offspring develop a herd over time. However, I think you could start with a handful of similarly-aged siblings living with a herd of modern elephants and simply cycle out the modern elephants as the mammoths grew up. You'd have to raise some boys too, and they may choose to be solitary or form a bachelor herd, because they'll get kicked out of the birth herd as they grow up. It would take nearly a modern human lifetime to develop a fully mature herd of mammoths with several generations of relatives. But we could get a functional herd with adults and offspring a lot faster.
If I were doing it, I'd aim to create 5 cores each with a set of 4 females and 1 male. Then put them in a big enough area so they could spread out and arrange their social interactions as they pleased. They would have enough individuals to start forming territories and relationships.
Now we need to talk about minimum viable population. You can't pat yourself on the back because you made 3 dire wolves or 5 mammoths. In order to count, you have to make enough to repopulate the species.
It has previously been suggested that elephant populations numbering as few as 100–300 individuals could be viable on 100-year timescales, but 1,000–3,000 may be necessary on longer timescales (Sukumar, 2003). Such prescriptions are too simplistic, because they ignore the vital rates themselves.
The lowball estimate is 100-300, and even the modified 1000-3000 is probably also far too low considering how slowly proboscideans reproduce. Can you afford to create, not just 1 or 5 individuals, but thousands? Because you have to build that many individuals at first, in order to create the genetic diversity they need to survive long-term and adapt to changing conditions. You can't just make a few and rely on reproduction, because of inbreeding. Even if you comb like crazy to remove all the bad genes you can find, you'll never get them all, and even then it's not a great idea because some genes have both positive and negative effects or even their impact is entirely contextual. Plus you shouldn't make your edited genes all identical, which is tricky -- you need to search for or create subtle variations. Frex, all the new dire wolves are white but most wolf types come in multiple colors. Diversity is strength. It is not ethical to start that ball rolling unless you are fully prepared to keep pushing it until the species is truly capable of sustaining itself. I don't think these scientists have done that math. But still, I would rather have 3 dire wolves than 0. Where there is life, there is hope.
I know how hard this is, I've done it, and it's a favorite tactic. But it is really fucking tedious, even if you have a computer with a good dither program to help build out your population. It just takes a monumental amount of manhours to achieve.
Just as important as Colossal’s mission to restore extinct species is its efforts to stop endangered ones from winking out entirely.
This is actually the most crucial advance. They've done the one thing nobody else has done: they have created fresh individuals. Not copies. Not babies from a minute gene pool. Pure original animals who should be able to breed naturally and effectively. THAT is the one thing that can save a species like red wolves or black-footed ferrets that have definitely been reduced below MVP. That's now a fixable problem. And that gets my vote for a Nobel. You have to wait and prove impact, so I'd say, make the nomination after they have bred fresh individuals and raised viable offspring to adulthood. That's doable with wolves in a few years, so I recommend they get cracking on those red wolves.
Along with its news about the dire wolves, the company also announced that it had cloned four red wolves—a small but important step in fortifying the species as a whole. With so few individuals remaining, the species suffers from what is known as a “genetic bottleneck,” a lack of diversity in the genome that can lead to infertility and inherited birth defects. What is needed is a way to refresh the gene line with new DNA, and science may have a way.
In the days before advanced genomics, conservationists identified all species—including the red wolf—principally by their phenotype, or appearance. Plenty of wolves that did not fit the right size or color for the red wolf might have been carrying what researchers refer to as “ghost alleles”—or red wolf gene variations that did not show up in the wolves’ color, size, or shape. Recently, Bridgett vonHoldt, a Colossal scientific adviser and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, an associate professor of wildlife science and conservation at Michigan Tech, discovered populations of canids along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas whose DNA included both coyote genes and red wolf ghost alleles. The four red wolves the Colossal scientists created used that natural genetic reservoir to produce what they call the first Ghost Wolf, with an eye to eventually fortifying the red wolf species with more such young carrying a variety of genes.
They are doing that part exactly right. :D 3q3q3q!!!
The cloned red wolves now live in a separate fenced area within the same 2,000-acre preserve as the dire wolves. Like Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, they will spend their lives there and not be rewilded. But later red wolves might be, as Colossal learns more about the clones’ health and fitness. The company says it’s in advanced discussions with the state of North Carolina about “conservation tools that can be used to help rescue the red wolf and accelerate its recovery.”
At least they have a viable, responsible game plan for the red wolves.
Through their work trying to bring back the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, one member of the marsupial family that includes the quoll, Colossal scientists have identified a single change in a single nucleotide—a basic building block of DNA and RNA—that could confer a 5,000-fold resistance to the cane toad neurotoxin.
That ... is a riskier approach.
“We as humanity introduced this cane toad species. We as humanity are now inadvertently killing off the quoll as well as other marsupials,” says Lamm. “This one change can make these super quolls that can love eating cane toads. Those are the types of wins that we can get using these genetic technologies.”
And what if the mod-quolls, like the cane toads, decide to do something different than humans want?
Still, scientists not affiliated with the company stress that genetic engineering is head-crackingly complex, and all manner of unintended downstream consequences can occur when you start mucking around in the engine room of the cells.
Sure. But it's still more refined than the biosphere's method of throwing a trillion plates of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. At least humans can try to aim. The question is how good they are at extrapolating what is a good idea, how to get there, what the predictable failure modes are, and how to avoid them.
“There’s a phenomenon called pleiotropy in which one gene has an effect on more than one trait,” says Alison van Eenennaam, professor of animal biotechnology and genetics at the University of California, Davis. “That’s true for many, many, many genes.
Almost all genes, in fact. DNA is an elegant system, which means that like fractals, there's a lot of multitasking.
There could be some genes they’re targeting for specific traits that have effects that are not compatible with survival.”
Of course there will be. It's one of the things that causes a high rate of deformities and early deaths. But it's a numbers game. If you're willing to pay the butcher's bill, you can crank out an answer to what is viable or not, and it may not always be the answer you expect. Look at malaria resistance / sickle-cell anemia in humans. I will further point out that the biosphere gives zero fucks about the butcher's bill or mortal suffering, and will shove whole genera into the grinder without hesitation to see if anything survives.
Gengineers need not only a sharp brain but also nerves of steel and an iron stomach. Don't cause needless suffering, but understand that monkeywrenching life will necessarily cause some. Consider your tolerances before choosing that career or even following it as a hobby, because the ethics are a lot more complex than most humans deal with. I mean you're literally getting off their standard chart, and at that not many even make it to the level 3 post-conventional state (nor is it encouraged). The next stage, cosmic or transcendental, is only theorized on that model. I can tell you it includes things like "Don't wipe out species," "Don't ravage the biosphere of an alien planet," "Don't blow up planets / stars," "Don't collapse a dimension," "Diversity is strength," etc. So if you're attempting to repair a biosphere? That is the level of ethics you need to analyze its cost-benefit and risk-benefit and other key calculatons regarding what you should or should not do. Don't pick up the hard science if you can't handle the corresponding soft science equally well, because that way lies disaster.
Then, too, there’s always the possibility that a precious handful of de-extincted animals could run riot in the modern world. The cane toad’s transition from pest eater to invasive species is a reminder of how quickly human intrusion into wild processes can spin out of control. Bioethicist Latham points to mosquito control as one more concerning example.
True, but you have to consider the failure modes. Reintroducing an extinct or extirpated species to its own environment is radically different from introducing a species where it does not belong. You'll still see some upheaval, but you're restoring a part that was missing and will, likely, improve matters by returning. We have numerous examples of this. That doesn't mean it can't go wrong, just that it's a solid bet -- and you also have to compare with the risk of doing nothing to stop the ongoing degradation from its loss, which can be astronomical.
Second, consider your control factors. It's not ethical to gengineer things that can breed out of control with a natural population, oh wait, L-Earth doesn't have that rule. But where you don't have a natural population, there isn't one to wreck by crossing with gengineered critters. By this rule, mammoths would be safer to revive than dire wolves, but even dire wolves would probably much prefer to breed with each other than with different species of canids -- if they'd even be fertile. That should absolutely be checked in a lab before considering a release, but if they are not fertile with other canids then that risk is null. Another option is to place species in a habitat where there simply aren't others they could mix with; islands work great for this, minding the rule of no introduced foreign species (oh wait, L-Earth doesn't use that rule either).
Colossal scientists are pressing ahead nonetheless, and the company is already thriving in an adaptive niche of its own—not just as a scientific enterprise, but as a formidable business. It has reached decacorn status, currently valued at $10.2 billion, and while it may not be easy to monetize a mammoth or a dodo or a dire wolf pup, Lamm sees plenty of commercial potential in the technologies his scientific team is developing.
Yes, there is. Zoos are one approach, and it may be argued that putting some animals in a zoo to improve the odds of species survival is justified -- as long as it's not the only endgame. But beyond that: SWAG. Dire wolf t-shirts, mouse pads, dog biscuits, anything you can think of. Same with mammoths. Make a website and start selling stuff. So long as you are working with endangered or extinct species, and not the fucking mimmoths, you can legitimately start a charity for people to sponsor their production and support. I would throw money at mammoths, or even dire wolves. But not dodos. I suspect someone else would, though. Seriously, science dudes, hire some marketing experts and try to find one with sane ethics. They're good at things you are not.
One, called Breaking, uses engineered microbes and enzymes to break down plastic waste.
You damn well better make sure THAT doesn't have a containment breach or you just screwed modern civilization. Look around your room: how much would disappear if something ate all the plastic? And what if plastic was no better for food preservation than the paper it muchly replaced?
Colossal does not have the field to itself—even if it is currently the most conspicuous player. Revive & Restore, a California-based conservation organization, provides funding for projects worldwide involving de-extinction, increasing biodiversity, and saving endangered species. Another group, Rewilding Europe, is providing support to scientists working to preserve and restore species across the European continent, including the bearded vulture, the Iberian lynx, the marbled polecat, the imperial eagle, and the auroch—the extinct ancestor of domestic cattle.
Like I said, charities offer a serious route to monetize revival science. Use it. And wahoo Team Aurochs! Can I hear a vote for the Irish greatdeer?
Whether the existing dire wolves or others Colossal might produce will be allowed to mate and spawn a next generation of wolves naturally is not yet known. Handlers can monitor the female estrous cycles and separate the animals at key times or employ contraceptive implants that keep the wolves from producing young until it is determined whether they have any abnormalities that could be passed on. The MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying.
Aho!
“I think of that famous Teddy Roosevelt quote,” says James, paraphrasing the 26th President. “In the moment of any choice, the first thing to do is the right thing. The next thing to do is the wrong thing. The worst thing to do is nothing at all.”
Often true, but Freeze is still a valid and even popular survival strategy. If you have time to think things through, you need to do that. In a really chaotic, changing situation like today -- doing nothing, or rather continuing the same course, will definitely screw you.
But today, L-Earth has dire wolves again. That's worth celebrating.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-09 07:50 am (UTC)That said, I hope Colossal use their tech to do something about the genetic diversity of cheetahs as well. There is a gene-pool in need of some fresh blood, and we have well preserved ancient mummies of cheetahs we could extract DNA from. They could even practice using domestic cats first.
Thoughts
Date: 2025-04-09 09:04 am (UTC)That's about what I figured. Honestly, I would've started the cubs on live feeder mice at 2-3 months, then offered things like ground-nesting birds or rabbits. Once they have the idea that this is food on the hoof, predators rarely have a problem extrapolating to other prey species and will select what prey they prefer. Interestingly, some cats are devout aerialists who love hunting birds, while others ignore them in favor of mice or more rarely fish. Then there are the rare cats who are essentially big-game hunters and go after squirrels or rabbits. I've even seen some farm cats pride-hunting like lions, effectively. Much the same is true of dogs. Some like birds, others prefer mice or rabbits. So I expect wolves are the same.
>> That said, I hope Colossal use their tech to do something about the genetic diversity of cheetahs as well. There is a gene-pool in need of some fresh blood, and we have well preserved ancient mummies of cheetahs we could extract DNA from. <<
Yeah, cheetahs are fucked.
>>They could even practice using domestic cats first.<<
The closer the better. I'd recommend using a larger, plentiful cat. Jaguarundi and cougar are both least concern and the closest relatives of cheetahs.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-09 12:53 pm (UTC)Pigeons
Date: 2025-04-09 05:08 pm (UTC)1) an animal evolved for tropical climes is better suited to the now, than animals evolved for frigid ones. Why gengineers are all in on the Ice Age in a time of extreme heat is beyond my ken.
2) Humans love a "loser animal" (sometimes the way cats do, sometimes not). But I could see dodos being used in "panda diplomacy" for the Global South.
Re: Pigeons
Date: 2025-04-09 05:34 pm (UTC)Point.
>> Why gengineers are all in on the Ice Age in a time of extreme heat is beyond my ken.<<
It's a coicidence of chronology. They were recent enough that we can revive them, and that the ecosystem still remembers theme. Plus humans are heavily implicated in their extinction.
I think the best places for them will be those currently locked in ice, such as Greenland or Antarctica. Those are fast losing their ice sheets, but they won't be actually warm for a long time.
>>2) Humans love a "loser animal" (sometimes the way cats do, sometimes not). But I could see dodos being used in "panda diplomacy" for the Global South.<<
Fair point.
Re: Pigeons
Date: 2025-04-10 01:13 am (UTC)Re: Pigeons
Date: 2025-04-10 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-13 04:19 am (UTC)I think people went for a "Wow, that's cool!" animal rather than trying to engineer a whole ecosystem. Humans love dogs/canids, there /are/ extant species of wolves, there is a lot of information on keeping canids alive...and I suspect it is easier to keep them safe from other humans than it would be for, say, a wooly rhino or something.
>>I'd look at recreating giant animals from extant analogs -- that is, breed the biggest hairiest horses and the biggest hairiest cattle with an eye toward replacing lost species. We could likely do this much faster than actually de-extincting species.<<
It would also be possible to do the breeding program and then try to splice extinct DNA back into the gene pool at some point down the line. I don't think that would be any weirder than using radioactivity to mutate new strains of grapefruit!
>>The biggest argument against the ethics of reviving dire wolves is don't create anything that could kill you.<<
...most of the deadliest animals on the planet are herbivores. Unless you count the omnivorous human...
>>I'd take a serious look at recolonizing Antarctica in the foreseeable future. It's not actually all that far from the climate that mammoths can endure, but you'd need to restore vegetation first. I think it's doable.<<
Is it possible to do so without killing off penguin colonies? I imagine land-based carnivores would be devastating to their nesting sites...
>>The dodo ... is legitimate only to salve the human conscience. Let's be honest, this is not really a naturally viable species.<<
I think the main issue with them would be the limited range and susceptibility to invasive species.
>>O_O Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to make anything remotely like a mimmoth? Have we not already got enough mouse problems without buffing them? This is a terrible idea.<<
Probably because they're the most popular lab animal. What kind of animal would you have chosen for that experiment?
>>Humans are not only an apex species, they're over the roughly 50-pound limit where mass extinctions tend to kill off all large mammals.<<
I wonder if pygmy-sized humans might be able to cheat that limit?
>>Valid, but a reintroduced, revived species is not the same as an introduced, invasive species. <<
I could see a reintroduced species causing problems if the rest of the ecosystem is sufficiently unbalanced. Like, putting beavers someplace with only a few saplings might wipe out the forest, so it might be better to wait until there are more adult trees.
>>...the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems.<<
I wonder if these effects are genetic, epigenetic, or environmental?
>>What’s more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo.<<
I would suggest using a surrogate that is a) much larger than the cloned species and b) is very good for producing/brooding young (if those features are possible.)
>>Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic—not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives.<<
It might be possible to give them a pack which includes some extant wolf species. (Though imprinting on a different species may have odd effects on future courtship habits, which should be considered for a potential breeding program.)
>>I will point out that while de-extincting a species is honorable, doing so just to masturbate your feelings or stare at it in a zoo is NOT.<<
I think they were doing it as a proof-of-concept thing. Also, a lot of very endangered species are commonly kept in zoos for breeding programs - and to protect them from hunters.
>>They better be careful with that, because while modern wolves have some respect for humans, dire wolves remember them mostly as "long pig."<<
Is that an instinctual response or a learned one? Because the two problems have different solutions.
>> I'd like to see if dire wolves could learn to eat mice, rabbits, and current-sized bison. Then, would that be enough to support a breeding population of dire wolves?<<
...might also end up with direXgrey hybrids.
>>The lowball estimate is 100-300, and even the modified 1000-3000 is probably also far too low considering how slowly proboscideans reproduce.<<
Look up the #'s for humans, we are similarly slow breeders. Also, do you need all them at once, or can you add mew individuals in an 'installment plan' sort of way?
Also consider who will incubate them - dire wolves could be incubated in modern dogs (probably), but elephants to incubate mammoths are much rarer.
>>Frex, all the new dire wolves are white but most wolf types come in multiple colors.<<
But, some species are monocolor - polar bears, for example, and many arctic species display light coloration, either year-round or in the winter.
If the coloration is a problem, I'd suggest reintroducing color genes from the closes living relatives.
>>You have to wait and prove impact, so I'd say, make the nomination after they have bred fresh individuals and raised viable offspring to adulthood.<<
Again, be careful of the imprinting problem.
>>And what if the mod-quolls, like the cane toads, decide to do something different than humans want?<<
...where did they identify this gene? Is it already extant in the population, and if so, by how much?
>>The next stage, cosmic or transcendental, is only theorized on that model.<<
I think a lot of people can abstractly realize that being an omnicidal maniac is bad... though to be fair, knowing that killing is bad hasn't stopped warfare and execution and poorly-thought-out recklessness.
Then again, I may have a nonstandard ethical framework.
>>Reintroducing an extinct or extirpated species to its own environment is radically different from introducing a species where it does not belong.<<
It is valid to consider that megafauna can be very hazardous to humans. Elephants are quite troublesome in certain parts of the world, from what I hear.
>>...would probably much prefer to breed with each other than with different species of canids -- if they'd even be fertile.<<
Again, some species prefer to breed with their own species, while other prefer to breed with whatever they consider their own species, and the latter can get awkward.
>>...it may be argued that putting some animals in a zoo to improve the odds of species survival is justified...<<
Put the specimens that are not viable in the wild in teaching zoos - there will probably be at least a few.
>>Look around your room: how much would disappear if something ate all the plastic?<<
Eh, the only plastic stuff we'd need would be medical stuff. Yeah, a plastic-eating microbe would cause an apocalypse, but it would be possible to reengineer most other tech with different materials eventually. (Yeah, my response is reall casual...but we're about equally screwed with microplastics too, so...)
>>The MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying.<<
...cue interesting legal discussion.
Also, Would it be possible to have some nomadic First Nations group travel with revival mammoths? I know a lot of endangered megafauna in Africa need armed bodyguards, so it could be a useful symbiosis - and someone would probably pay pretty well. Plus, given the fact that humans and elephants are both very tractive, a few generations in, and you might have some cross-species kinship networks.